Yesterday, Mayorkas – Joe Biden's secretary of Homeland Security (pictured above) – appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to discuss in detail specific aspects of the administration's immigration policies and programs. He was encouraged by committee chair Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) to "be prepared" to discuss, among other things, data on "encounters, gotaways, paroles, and releases" along the southern border since Biden took office.
During the hearing, Rep. Harriett Hageman (R-Wyoming) – a member of that committee – expressed gratitude to Mayorkas for perfectly illustrating the type of government official America's founders warned about when they made freedom of speech the very first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
"I thanked him for being the epitome of the exact tyrant that our forefathers recognized would go into government to attempt to take away our rights," Hageman said on Washington Watch Wednesday afternoon.
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), also a member of that committee, pressed Mayorkas on a dismal run as director which has seen record levels of illegal immigration coupled with a rapid decline in deportations, skyrocketing fentanyl deaths across the country, and a Secret Service – a component of DHS – with an inability to determine who left cocaine at the White House, the most surveilled and protected residence in the country.
The embattled DHS secretary has faced impeachment calls from many House Republicans.
It's a very difficult record to defend, if in fact that was Mayorkas' goal in his appearance before the House Homeland Security Committee. It would appear, according to Hageman, that his goal was more to deny, deflect and confuse.
"He lied throughout his testimony. If folks go and watch the hearing and [hear] his testimony, there was an enormous amount of frustration because all he did was dance and deflect and avoid and ignore and try to run out the clock for anyone who was actually attempting to hold him accountable or ask him legitimate questions," the GOP lawmaker told show host Tony Perkins.
Mayorkas' performance in the hearing underscored a greater strategy within the Biden administration, Hageman said, that seeks to silence any opposing viewpoint through any means it deems necessary.
She calls it the "Censorship Industrial Complex."
Judge to DHS and others: Stop talking to Big Tech
Homeland Security was among a number of federal agencies barred by Louisiana judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, from contacting Big Tech social media companies for the purpose of discussing posts it deems harmful or misleading. Doughty wrote in his Missouri v. Biden ruling on July 4:
"The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden's policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech."
Doughty's ruling is being appealed.
"They are attempting to identify [political opponents] as domestic violent extremists," Hageman continued. "… They're categorizing people with whom they disagree on policy as somebody that they can then go after and use the full weight of the federal government to punish them, to marginalize them, to stop them from speaking, to take away their First Amendment rights. That's what I focused on with Mayorkas."
Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, for example, the FBI has been used to investigate parents who speak in protest at local school board meetings and has infiltrated Catholic churches in search of potential terrorists, according to multiple media reports.
Like it weaponizes DOJ, administration weaponizes language
Hageman said the Biden administration not only weaponizes government resources but also weaponizes the English language to paint its opponents as extremists.
"This is an incredibly important First Amendment issue," she explained. "There's a university that is explaining and training people how to prevent conservatives and Christians from being able to communicate. They're lumping Fox News and the Heritage Foundation and a variety of other organizations together with Nazis and terrorists. That way they can marginalize people and make it so that they can't actually engage in the public square."
To many in the Republican Party, the greatest and most visible failing of Homeland Security under Mayorkas is the southern border. But what's happening there is just the realization of campaign promises made by Joe Biden during his run for president, Rep. Elijah Crane (R-Arizona) told Perkins.
"Our current commander in chief during his campaign told the American people – and quite frankly, the world – that if you feel oppressed, you should come here and that anybody seeking asylum will have the chance to be heard. We all knew at the time what this was going to lead to opening the floodgates and would completely overwhelm an already taxed border security system," Crane said.
One the witnesses who spoke at the hearing Wednesday was a mother from Texas who lost her mother and daughter when their vehicle was hit by another that was exceeding 100 miles an hour. Crane said the driver was fleeing law enforcement and carried 11 illegals with him.
As an Arizona lawmaker Crane, a former Navy SEAL, sees the border damage up close.
"We have, I think, over 70,000 people a year, families being destroyed, from fentanyl. We have families who are losing loved ones to MS 13 gang violence, families being torn apart and human beings destroyed because of the sex trafficking epidemic that's going on in this country," he said.
Trump hate overrides common sense border security
Crane said Democrats will never get to their beloved talking point of immigration reform because they want it now. They're not willing to make the necessary sacrifices of progression to reach a goal.
"On the SEAL teams we had a saying: 'Crawl, walk, run.' You never get to run if you don't learn how to walk; and you never get to walk if you don't learn how to crawl. We would base all of our training on slowly ramping up the complexities of the mission sets that we were forced to do," he said.
The "crawl" part of border security, Crane shared, is a wall or some type of physical barrier – but the very topic is way off limits because of Democrats' extreme hate for former President Donald Trump, he said.
"It's pretty clear that the media, the Democrat party and quite frankly, a lot of elitists around the world, hate Donald Trump and everything that he did, everything that he stood for," Crane added. "I think that they see the border wall as an extension of Donald Trump, and therefore they're not even allowed to acknowledge that walls and barriers have worked since the beginning of time, whether at military bases and prisons or around our own personal homes."
The Arizona lawmaker said that shows him Democrats "aren't serious about protecting the people that we're supposed to be protecting in this government."
